Starck truth continued

More from the poetic pen of Walter Starck...I absolutely love the line featuring "sunbeams and summer breezes", I can almost hear a song coming on.

Although the climate alarm has suffered a major loss of credibility with the electorate, the true believers are still desperately pushing it and it retains at least pro forma political and media support from those too far out on the limb to retreat gracefully. Regardless of all this, the political momentum of climate change is fading and the bedrock reality is that we are not going to power a modern economy with sunbeams and summer breezes. Neither is a green economy going to enable the productivity necessary to avoid severe economic decline. The very term “green economy” is an oxymoron for any economy above the level of hunter-gathering. The so-called “green” energy solutions are not only unaffordable; but, with a full accounting of the impacts, energy and resources involved in building, maintaining and operating them, they aren’t even “green”. At the bottom line any net reduction in emissions from renewables, other than hydro, is lost in the rounding.  

It has been reported that about an hour after hitting the reef and with his ship listing badly the captain of the Costa Concordia ordered a dinner from the galley. Why should anyone be surprised? The entire Australian parliament only recently ordered themselves a magnanimous increase in their already generous salaries and pensions at a time when their ship of state is sinking into chronic deficit.

The Starck truth

We fool ourselves (and probably those who rely on us for information) when we believe that the way we currently live is somehow unrelated to what or how we believe. What we believe determines how our culture develops or declines because one thing is certain; culture does not remain in stasis or neutral as some would like to believe.
It grows or dies!
Read this extract by Walter Starck:

The wealth and prosperity in developed nations we now assume to be a normal, natural and permanent condition is in fact a quite recent development. It will maintain only so long as our own productivity can sustain it. Throughout history nations and civilisations forever rise and fall. Prosperity seems to bring the seeds of its own destruction. With it government expands and bureaucracy proliferates. A growing population of drones and pseudo-workers occupy positions but produce nothing while a diminishing productive sector is taxed and regulated into penury.

The prosperity we enjoy is not a given. The productive sector which provides it is under siege and struggling. In Australia manufacturing at only 11% of GDP is at the bottom of the scale for developed nations. Farming and grazing are besieged by environmental restrictions and demands, ever increasing costs, a domestic market dominated by a retailer duopoly and overseas sales suffering from an Australian dollar near its all-time high.

Surrounded by ocean and the largest least exploited fishing grounds per capita in the world   our fishing industry is in terminal decline; but, not from overfishing. It is entirely from massive over regulation and mismanagement. As a result our fishing industry only produces a total catch one-half that of New Zealand and one-third that of Papua New Guinea with imports supplying 70% of domestic seafood consumption.

In an economy increasingly dependent on mining and selling off non-renewable mineral resources, new carbon and mining taxes are set to rip much of the profit from this last significant remaining area of economic profitability. Since pension funds are major shareholders in these companies, the new imposts might more accurately be termed pensioner taxes. As for the companies themselves, government imposed demands have raised the bar for entry in miming to a level only the big cash rich multinationals can reach and they will simply direct their future investment elsewhere if profits here become un-attractive.

Meanwhile, our schools and universities are experiencing declining enrolments for trade skills, the core sciences and engineering but burgeoning demand for degrees in social studies, law, environmental studies and sundry other such non-productive activities which exist only as creations of government. It appears that many people are quite willing to sell their soul for a cushy job which appears important but doesn’t require much actual effort or ability. Most attractive of all are the jobs with government itself wherein there are generous wages and benefits, ironclad job security and no bottom line accountability. The result is a growing portion of the population educated to fill non-productive positions for which there are already a surplus of applicants.

Sobering facts are they not?
Further misconception:

The end result of this social divide between producers and non-producers is a two speed economy comprised of a minority productive sector largely residing in rural areas and regional towns with a majority non-productive sector concentrated in the capital cities. The urban non-producers comprise an electoral majority and always vote for more benefits for themselves which ultimately have to come from the productive sector. In addition to a high degree of isolation from and ignorance of productive activity, the non-producers are heavily imbued with politically correct views inculcated with their education and by the media. Rather than any gratitude or even perhaps a little guilt over their parasitic relation to the producers, they prefer to assume an attitude of superior knowledge and ethics. This is especially apparent in matters relating to the environment, social justice and the economics of production. Here the display of righteous certainty and abysmal ignorance about matters of which they have nil experience is truly impressive.

The element of humour

Ha Ha I had to reproduce this example of creative writing from Jo Nova's blog...much truth is contained within humour:

New Element Discovered

The CSIRO announced the discovery of a perverse, perplexing atom

The new element is Governmentium (Gv). It has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of 3-6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.
When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons. All of the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other byproducts are produced

VIt'e' naD lalDan 'e' tIv

These comments from the editor of MercatorNet cut to the quick of a particular problem in our world today.

We have run several articles in MercatorNet over the past few weeks on same-sex marriage. After moderating hostile comments from critics of natural marriage, I have come to feel that we are speaking, so to speak, homophonically: the words of our articles make sense in English, but some people are reading them in a different language. There's almost no communication going on. I feel at a loss when commenters post comments like: "good and evil? Get over it." Or "what so special about being natural?" Or "the purpose of sex isn't about having babies anymore. What about IVF?" Or "you have your morality and I have mine." To my mind, these suggest not just two different views of the same problem, but two different universes of logic. It's important to deal directly with the issue of same-sex marriage - and a host of other issues which put human dignity at risk - but until we have reached agreement on fundamental issues of logic and meaning, we will be talking homophonically.

We begin to debate/argue/communicate with another over some issue around politics/aesthetics/morality and soon discover that we are not only talking over each others heads but we may actually appear to be speaking another language and sometimes the communication is so awry that that language may as well be Klingon.

Our 'experts' have so confused the common mans worldview by relativising truth and trashing historical accuracy that we no longer appear to occupy the same universe as the 'elite'. Few people know what to believe so they say they believe in nothing but in reality they end up believing in every new fashionable fantasy that the philosophical carpetbaggers trot out for consumption. This is why the scaremongers and the ideologues can convince large swathes of ordinarily reasonable people to believe in their Utopian ideals.

We have been indoctrinated to believe that all worldviews carry the same weight, that there is no such thing as an absolute truth or any truth at all, and that everything is mere personal opinion. Actually many don't really believe this but we daren't say so because it is not politically correct to say that we believe in one perspective over another and the consequences of breaking that rule have become quite dramatically painful.

Those who break away from the herd suffer a loss of credibility, exclusion from the 'inner circle', mockery, persecution and often lose their opportunity to advance in career terms or often even to earn a living. Just like what happened to the persecuted in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR, but these things are happening to ordinary, everyday Australian's in a 'democratic' country where such things could never occur, right? Wrong!

Hollywood mirrors real life.

I recently viewed the movie The Invasion with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, about an alien 'virus' which infects humans like the flu bug and renders them 'peaceful', unlike what we humans normally are, which is violent, rapacious, warlike etc. Interestingly the humans also become robotic in nature somewhat like the Stepford wives and this appears to be what our intellectual elite are trying to do to us even now with their excessive occupational health and welfare laws, politically correct obsessions and the excessive legal and bureaucratic straight-jackets that they continue to impose on the general population.

Good ole Hollywood lefties, evangelizing their twist on James Lovelock's view of the 'human virus' which is hurting the Gaia he so evidently loves. I finished watching the movie and flicked on to ABC TV and whats on; but BIG IDEAS with Tim Flannery spruiking his Anthropogenic Warming theory and how we nasty humans are destroying the planet.

Fiction becomes fact!

The new elite truly hate humanity, but they cloak their misanthropic impulses with We are the World songs, or vacant, tremulous, "I love you all" statements uttered by drug addled rock 'stars', and the endless repetition of words like; healing, nurturing, peace, empathy, sustainability etc...all of which serve as a new atheistic opiate, numbing the reality of this world gone mad and it all kind of makes the underlying hatred worse, because just like the aliens in the movie you don't know who or what to believe anymore.

Sure we are hurting this world, something we have been aware of for decades, back then we called it SIN. But puuulllleaze...it is most definitely not fashionable to use such mythological language in today's highly evolved civilization.

The Post Modernists teach that history has been fabricated by duplicitous schemers and thus dismissible, the Marxists teach that religion is the 'opiate of the masses', i.e. an elaborate panacea, and our current 'intellectual elite', the secularised scientists/philosophers/socialists all believe that we were born 'good' and its our mean (see capitalism) social 'environment' that has corrupted us and therefore if we can merely usher in a more 'friendly' environment, (see wealth distribution) all our problems will be solved...just like the movie!

All of these blathering idiots think that their discovery of human beings hurting the planet is earth shattering (excuse the pun) new information.The true travesty behind all of these  'revelations' is that most of these starry eyed utopianists believe that somehow, we humans can change the weather with a new tax or two and human nature with restrictive new laws!

What unbelievable hubris!

Thousands of years ago a man named Moses brought just ten laws down from a mountain top to show humankind how impossible the task of law keeping was. Law exposes sin it does not nor can it, erase sin.
Our human 'leaders' have spent the last hundred years attempting to eradicate all traces of this ancient law from modern society, and then they complain when man evidences the nature he was born with.

President Harry Truman wisely reflected that those who ignore or who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it and the history books record the truth of that statement.

What is that gurgling sound I hear?

Moral politics!!!!!!!

I reprint Martin Durkin's blog as is, for I could not say it any better:

POLITICIANS CALL FOR 'MORAL CAPITALISM' - the criminals are scolding their victims

Politicians from all sides have come together this morning to demand a new kind of ‘moral capitalism’.   Capitalism ought to be ‘responsible’ and should not be ‘rewarded for failure’.  Oh shame, where is thy blush?
These are the people who, desperate to buy votes with the money of others, tax and spend with obscene profligacy.  These are the people who, voracious in their appetite for office and contemputous of our desire to hold on to our earnings, borrow terrifying mountains of cash in our name, to be repaid by us and our children with interest.  These are the people who have printed money with such abandon, for decades, robbing ordinary people of their savings, destabilising the financial system, and creating the phony boom which has resulted, and can only ever have resulted, in the disastrous crash which has brought us to edge of ruin.
These self-serving, shamefaced and irresponsible politicians, whose yearning for power has profoundly distorted and corrupted the ordinary patterns of exchange which makes capitalism beneficial to us all, these odious creatures have the nerve to tell us to be more ‘moral’ in our dealings with each other.  They should choke on their words

WE need creators!

Thomas Sowell:

Focusing attention and attacks on people who have greater wealth-generating capacity -- whether races, classes or whatever -- has had counterproductive consequences, including tragedies written in the blood of millions. Whole totalitarian governments have risen to dictatorial power on the wings of envy and resentment ideologies.

Intellectuals have all too often promoted these envy and resentment ideologies. There are both psychic and material rewards for the intelligentsia in doing so, even when the supposed beneficiaries of these ideologies end up worse off. When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Both politicians and intellectuals have made their choice.

We are too quick to condemn the wealth makers as greedy and the wealth takers as 'compassionate'.
May we all be a little more reflective and understanding of what lies behind the issue.

Ship of fools

The following excerpt is, I think, worth translating first into 'Ozperanto' and then philosophically unpacking:

It’s not only that we no longer invent or pursue great dreams. Steyn points out that the progressives we put in charge are waging a war on progress. They oppose air conditioning, the internal combustion engine, oil exploration and almost anything that contributes to prosperity. So, despite what candidate Obama told Joe the Plumber, it’s not about spreading the wealth. It’s about equalizing poverty.

Steyn observes that we already suffer from a poverty of ambition. “We do not save, we do not produce. Instead we seek new, faster ways to live in the eternal present, in an unending whirl of sensory distraction.” We are a cosseted society devoted to frivolousness.

Yes, in Australia the current power elites are most definitely placing every possible block in the path of any development, which though it may sound pleasant and proper (as in preserving the rain forests, the barrier reef, etc), it actually works out to be a sure fire way of destroying all the advances made in middle class existence, and it doesn't even preserve those things it purports to do (consider the destructive capabilities of the Wind farms).

Of course all the elites and the very rich will maintain their lifestyle, it is just that we will go backwards towards the early stages of pre-industrial life where the poor (most of us) live wretched, mean and struggling existences, serving our 'masters' who live lives of extraordinary ease...with the marked difference that this time around there will be significantly reduced and compromised 'religious' impulses to hold back the truly despotic urges of our 'ruler', with the inevitable end result of a bloodbath far exceeding the French revolution.

Is this just fear mongering in the vein of AGW scaremongers?

I think not, just reading the news and following financial, political, and legal developments; the facts are that the you-know-what is truly about to hit the fan. All current mass-escape avenues through sport, drugs, and general excess are not going to stave off the inevitable for much longer, and then it will become every man for himself, and given the example we see in the Italian cruise liner disaster it will not be pretty for women and children.

Perhaps it will be that this is the moment when the church will shine...I hope so. But I truly fear that syncretization has taken such a hold that it will be difficult to tell us apart from the 'world' as so often happens in life today.

May God have mercy on us all.

All fitz no bubble

The narcissistic blindness that many left-wing 'useful idiots' project regarding their own abilities speaks volumes about their ability to render constructive and objective opinions.

A prime example has to be the red bandanna clad buffoon Peter FitzSimons speaking out about the Tim Tebow phenomena in the States. FitzSimons' contribution to the mindless degradation of this talented and moral, sporting superstar was: "the closest Australian word is probably 'public wankery' ".
The fact that FitzSimons has displayed spectacular and public failures in each of these arenas makes him a hypocrite and in a world littered with mega-wankers, FitzSimons indubitably ranks high on the list.

Consider for example his miserable rugby career the high point of which was attacking an All Black player who knocked him out and then the referee sent FitzSimon off the field...his last game at that level! His pathetic claim that the spirit that makes Bob Dylan a legend also resides in him, (even though Fitzsimons is an atheist and avowed anti-Christian which incidentally renders his criticism of Tebow tainted with bias!) and when questioned about how he would describe his latest book he said:

It is nothing less than the greatest story in the history of the world, and I am not tossing that off as a glib phrase. Let there be criticism by all means of the way I have treated the story, but let there be no doubt about the wonder of the story itself.

One of the benefits of our current political regime is that we are free to express our opinions publicly. Fitzsimons wants to change our political landscape, no doubt because he sees himself amongst the favoured elite.

To quote Fizsimons’ wikipedia page:

“FitzSimons also contributes to various gay and trans-gender publications and sports a red bandanna(he started wearing after a trip to Cuba) to signify his socialist political views and leftist leanings”. He is also a paid up Labor Party member, has been since 1980.

A grade A wanker!

Bob the mild

Ask yourself the question; why is this government changing the occupational health and safety laws in such a way as to cause volunteer society's to have to close their doors or at the very least scale down their operations?     refer: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/i_rather_be_protected_from_safety_laws/

This maladroit administration is doing everything it can, and in as short a time as possible, to significantly alter the legal landscape so that more people are under government handout programs than ever before.
Why?
Because when they are dependant on government handouts they become slaves!

Why are they attacking volunteer groups?
Because these groups are often independent of government interferences and also foster a sense of community rather than bureaucratic oversight. That many (perhaps most) of these groups are 'religious' further inflames the Marxist inspired ideologues who occupy the pinnacles of power at the moment.

Independance from the nanny state is not good control methodology and must be crushed at every opportunity!

Sublime!

Roger Scruton on T.S.Eliot

...a vision of the modern world from a point of view outside it, a point of view irradiated by an experience of holiness.

and...

The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order, and allow the future to emerge. But it will not emerge, as we know. These philosophies of the "new world" are lies and delusions, products of a sentimentality which has veiled the facts of human nature.

Work

Some observations offered by Theodore Dalrymple, psychiatrist to criminals.

Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts.

                            ...................................................................................................

I changed the subject. I asked him whether he worked.

‘Do you mean work work?’ he said.

‘Is there any other kind?’

I thought about it for a second. In a way he was quite right, of course. There’s work (what my patient called work work) and there’s make-work. At a rough guess, I should say that about half the people in paid employment in this country do make-work, whose only end product is difficulties in the way of the other half, the half that does work work.

The preponderance of make work workers in Australia under the current make work government is rapidly out numbering the number of work work workers. When this number becomes unworkable, in a logical working world, those who make work should lose their work while those who work work should prosper,  but as we all know, in our current world, all is not what it seems. 

Dancing on the lip

Unfortunately this excerpt from a website describing unfair work practice based on political correctness rings true in Australian society as well and re-enforces my proposition that we are, as a civilization, circling the drain.

Is it the same at your workplace? Are you tired of having to hide your conservative or religious beliefs as if you live in a totalitarian state rather than America? If you continue to cower in silence before an intolerant militant minority, it will only get worse. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.” It’s time to do something—speak up.

Unintended consequences

Doesn't this excerpt (replace America with Australia) perfectly encapsulate our current 'human rights' confusion as articulated by the Greens/progressive/left-wing fools in government?

So many "rights" have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don't meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn't protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.

But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.

Adam Smith many years ago said that showing undue mercy towards criminals actually heaps cruelty onto their victims. Unfortunately most of our 'leaders' will not learn the truth of this adage until something happens to them or theirs; God grant that this is not so!

Airy fairies

Thomas Sowell writing about the generally odious impact that 20th Century intellectuals have had on our society.

If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.

Academic intellectuals are shielded by the principles of academic freedom and journalists in democratic societies are shielded by the principle of freedom of the press. Seldom do those who produce or peddle dangerous, or even fatal, ideas have to pay a price, even in a loss of credibility.

Who blames Rachel Carson, an environmentalist icon, because her crusading writings against DDT led to the ban of this insecticide in countries around the world — followed by a resurgence of malaria that killed, and continues to kill, millions of people in tropical Third World countries?

...Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

Patient vultures

Melanie Phillips excoriates the 'Honours roll' list in  England where knighthoods and other 'awards' are given to the 'worthy'. This small extract speaks about the prize awarded producer Peter Bazalgette (producer of Big Brother) for ‘services to broadcasting’.

His knighthood is a symptom of a culture in which excess has been normalised, brutalisation lionised and coarseness idolised. 

Such an honour also perfectly mirrors the political scene, in which principle is nowhere to be found and all that matters is winning power by pandering to the whims of fashion.

And so our Western culture circles the drain while those of a more, shall we say, 'rigorous' nature wait expectantly in the wings to pick over the remains at some future moment.
In 1999 Thomas Sowell said:

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles."

Purity provokes hate.

More on Tim Tebow, this time by Linda Chavez:

Tim Tebow harms no one when he bends a knee to thank Jesus for giving him the athletic gifts that have served him so well. And he's never said anything publicly about saving anyone's soul. So how is it offensive that his piety inspires others -- even his opponents on the field -- to join him in prayer? In an era when other famous athletes are better known for sexting, criminal assault or even murder, it's a mystery why humility and faith would be viewed negatively.

True tolerance means allowing others to believe what they choose and to express those beliefs, so long as they do not interfere with the liberty of others. Tebow does not insist that his teammates join him in prayer, nor does he interfere with those who choose a different religious -- or non-religious -- expression of joy and gratitude.

But illiberals want religion out of the public square altogether. They want to reinterpret the First Amendment to deny religious freedom, not to protect it. They want to force religious people of all faiths to keep their religion in the closet, while at the same time enforcing the open acceptance -- indeed, encouragement -- of behaviors that conflict with traditional religious tenets. The illiberal religious bigots believe putting a creche on public property is unconstitutional; but displaying a crucifix in a in a tax-supported museum is just fine, just so long as it's stuck in a jar of urine.

Tim Tebow is not the problem. The real problem is our willingness to be bullied into thinking that prejudice masked as tolerance is acceptable.

Amen!

Green mendacity

Martin Durkin examines the Green claims:

In a recent popular green book called Do Good Lives Have to Cost The Earth, a host of green authors stick the boot into free markets and call for more State powers.  Tom Hodgkinson rails against the ‘sick and bloated private sector’, Caroline Lucas attacks privatization and deregulation, Andrew Sims and Joe Smith tell us, ‘This is a call for the politicians to get their hands on the big levers again.’  In his book Heat, the radical green George Monbiot says bluntly, ‘It is a campaign not for more freedom, but for less.’

But hold on a minute.  How does the environment in the despised free capitalist West (air quality, water quality, etc) compare with that of the heavily planned, State-controlled Soviet Union, or Cuba or Communist China?  To take just one example, the economist Julian Simon quotes a Soviet official who said that ’50 million people in 192 cities [in the Soviet Union] are exposed to air pollutants that exceed national standards tenfold.’  The term the Russian official used was ‘catastrophic pollution’.  In Magnitogorsk, a coroner complained in 1991, ‘Every day there is some new disaster … a worker in his thirties dead from collapsed lungs, a little girl dead from asthma or a weakened heart.’  Shockingly, the coroner said that ‘over 90 percent of the children born here suffer from some pollution-related illness.’ 

Why are the Greens so rabidly keen on more State control?  No doubt they would argue that all their green concerns lead naturally to demands for more regulations and public spending and government restrictions. 

Or is the other way round?  Is there a class of bureaucratically-minded folk who favour more State control, for whom green concerns provide what they regard as a justification?  In other words, are the Greens looking after the dolphins, or are the dolphins looking after the Greens?

There is, I believe, a solid, self-interested, class basis for environmentalism.  Green is the natural world view of what sociologists call the ‘New Class’.

The noble savage.

Billionaire Fat Al strikes a blow for Gaia again. Here he is preaching from one of his 6 houses mansions about how much better it is to be poor.

In his Earth in the Balance, former vice-President Al Gore has come up with a chilling idea.  He says what is needed is ‘The imposition of export controls in developed countries that assess a technology’s ecological effect, just as the Cold War technology control regime (known as COCOM) made careful and usually accurate analyses of the potential military impact of technologies proposed for export.’

COCOM, let’s remind ourselves, blocked the export of advanced technology to poor countries, just in case they made weapons.  Al Gore suggests we do the same again, to prevent ‘ecologically damaging’ technology from reaching them. Can you imagine Al trying to pull that stunt with the State of Texas.  Sorry guys, we’ve made it illegal for anyone to sell you pesticides, herbicides, inorganic fertlizer, gas-guzzling SUVs and various types of industrial equipment.  I wonder what the State of Texas would have to say.  Thanks for keeping us out of harm’s way Al.

There is real violence in these calls for restrictions.  The fat Green imperialists are dictating the terms of development for the world’s poorest people:  You must not aspire to be rich.  ‘Gaia’ will not accept it.  It will cause Global Warming.  In any case you are better off as peasants, and we will ensure, by restricting trade, that you stay as you are.  You may not buy this, you may not sell that.  You will enjoy this standard of living, but not that.   

There is something ugly and sinister behind the apparently benevolent, fashionable attempt to preserve charming, traditional peasant life.  And also behind their gushing concern for ‘the planet’.   Barely concealed behind the jargon of ‘sustainability’ is the dark, reactionary prejudice of nasty, well-to-do people who would deny material progress to others.

Its in the genes

Full marks to channel nines 60 minutes program last night (1.1.12). The Gillard/Ludwig disaster of closing down the cattle industry was shown at its incompetent worst. A government should not be allowed to do what this one did to its own citizens. Only Soviet style rule can account for debacles such as this.

Windshuttle nails the political DNA underpinning this government:

Apart from delivering on the big debt she owes to the trade union movement, Gillard’s most ambitious left-wing agenda item is to make the population conform to state-approved codes of taste, speech, sexual behaviour, parenting, body fat, and gambling habits. Gillard also has a target for 40 per cent of young people to go to university, a piece of social engineering designed, as she says, to produce more people like herself. The Left’s main objective today is no longer democracy or liberty but conformity. In short, while leftists can adopt conservative reforms on some issues, they still cannot jettison their conviction that they are superior beings who have the right to dictate to others how they should live.